Help with SSD

[KingEddie]

Hello I have a Asus Prime Z390-a motherboard for the *th and 9th gen. Looking for a m2 ssd. I would like a 2tb ssd, but don't know the difference from some of these, for example I found one from 2TB WD Blue style m.2 2280 for $219.99, also found Intel 660p for $181.99. I just need it for games can Anyone give me some advice on what route I should go of if any of these two are good choice. those seem to be the cheapest.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id personally get a 660p for games. Its about as cheap as you can get, and still plenty fast for load times.

 

Only big downside is the qlc flash, making the endurance lower(but your probably not installing more than one big game a day), and slow continous write speeds, but normally your network limited anyways, and not installing games that often.

[KingEddie]

Yea, I would probably install couple games a year if anything and just deleting games I wont play anymore.

[hotrob]

Definitely go with the 660p over the WD Blue. The 660p is just about the slowest nvme drive you can get, but it's going to be MUCH faster than any sata drive.

 

If you can squeeze it, the Silicon Power P34A80 is at least twice as fast, and is only about $60 (Canadian) more than the 660p.

 

However, if fairly fast $/GB is all you care about, 660p is still the way to go.

[Zando_]

6 minutes ago, hotrob said:

Definitely go with the 660p over the WD Blue. The 660p is just about the slowest nvme drive you can get, but it's going to be MUCH faster than any sata drive.

 

If you can squeeze it, the Silicon Power P34A80 is at least twice as fast, and is only about $60 (Canadian) more than the 660p.

 

However, if fairly fast $/GB is all you care about, 660p is still the way to go.

660p looks to be the same as or slightly worse than the non-NVMe Blue: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14223/the-western-digital-wd-blue-sn500-ssd-review/3 (article is for the WD Blue SN500 NVMe drive, but has the normal Blue and a 660p on the charts as well)

If the 660p is cheaper for the same capacity it's better though. 

[hotrob]

3 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

660p looks to be the same as or slightly worse than the non-NVMe Blue: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14223/the-western-digital-wd-blue-sn500-ssd-review/3 (article is for the WD Blue SN500 NVMe drive, but has the normal Blue and a 660p on the charts as well)

If the 660p is cheaper for the same capacity it's better though. 

I don't know that I agree with that reading of the article, for this given workload.

 

For gaming, read performance is what you most care about. And in both random and sequential read performance, the 660p is equal to or double the performance of the WD sata drive.

[Zando_]

Just now, hotrob said:

I don't know that I agree with that reading of the article, for this given workload.

 

For gaming, read performance is what you most care about. And in both random and sequential read performance, the 660p is equal to or double the performance of the WD sata drive.

Even in tasks that don't take advantage of NVMe? IIRC NVMe only has an advantage in larger file transfers, games use a lot of tiny files. 

[hotrob]

10 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Even in tasks that don't take advantage of NVMe? IIRC NVMe only has an advantage in larger file transfers, games use a lot of tiny files. 

No, NVME has an advantage with smaller files / random too.

 

AHCI is limited to one command cue, and 32 commands per cue. NVME has 65,535 command cues with 65,535 commands per cue (https://www.techrepublic.com/article/nvme-a-cheat-sheet/). That's a theoretical limit of about 4.3 billion commands in the same cycle that a sata drive could only do 32 (controllers are nowhere near maxing this out yet). And nvme also has a protocol for interrupting existing commands, where ACHI has to finish it's cue only one interrupt.

[Xplo1t]

I have two of the 660p drives and they are garbage.  Will have a short burst of NVMe like speed and then drop to 1/2 of a decent SATA HDD.  The Samsung 970 Evo drives have been on sale lately.  Picked up a 1TB one for $169USD today.  For a few games a year, spend the money on something that will perform better and probably last longer.  Even the 500GB version would server you well.

 

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BN217QG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1